Bill Knott’s rejection slips

Comment (1)

On July 30, 2008 at 3:05 pm Kent Johnson wrote:

Dear Mr. or Ms. [Knott],
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your selected rejections. After much consideration, we regret to inform you that we really don’t know what to make of them.
Is this gathering, in its childlike collage-array, to be taken as a primal cry from the soul, an avowal of failure and shame, a desperate lament from the Wilderness of Minor Rank?
Or is it, rather, an all-thumbs attempt at Clever Irony, a barely veiled self-congratulatory display, slyly proffered as a supercilious strutting of one’s superiority over mere editors of Poetry, such as we, who seem to increasingly prefer (as we believe you believe) the non-syllogistic indecencies of post-avant lunacies to the hard-edged rationalities of post-Parra (and to use a word you will favor) litotes?
Please pardon our baroque modification. And forgive us that our response cannot be more personal, even handwritten. But we are sure you can understand we have 2500 Poet-bloggers a fortnight who, just like you, submit to us their rearranged rejecta.
In any case, though not that it’s any kind of consolation, perhaps you can add this one to your undoubtedly bourgeoning collection. It is a form rejection, true, but we have put some time, as a staff, into making it original.
Permit us, then, to sign off with that universal, but sincere icon of Solidarity and Compassion, and which is the very Name of our magazine:
:~)